I recently read Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. It's an interesting book, and it does a good job of ground-clearing of the "I read all these books so you don't have to" variety, but I have some reservations about it.

The book has several big ideas. First, ideas about cyberspace and its impact are myths. Not myths in the sense of ideas that are "delusional and completely wrong," but myths used by religious scholars- concepts that order our understanding of the world, that, as Alisdair MacIntyre put it, "are neither true nor false, but living or dead." (29) Myths of cyberspace, promulgated by figures as varied as Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Negroponte, helped drive the dot-com boom, the belief that the Internet would transform modern life, and predictions about the end of history, politics, and space. The digital library, information highway, e-commerce, and virtual community were all, in one way or another, representations of the myth.

Myths of cyberspace were also part of a broader discourse that developed in the years before Y2K, characterized by "a general willingness to entertain the prospect of a fundamental turning point in society and culture" (55-56). The Internet was assigned the role of driver of changes that were already under discussion. Most prominent among them were arguments about the end of history; the death of distance (something that's been happening since at least the telegraph and railroad); and the end of conventional politics (exemplified by the arguments of the Progress and Freedom Foundation).

But it turns out that such technological myths aren't new. When they were new, the telegraph, electric light, radio, and television all seemed to some to herald a new age in which war would be obsolete, economies would prosper, and the lion would lie down with the lamb. In each case, those predictions turned out to be false. Just as Brian Arthur argues that it's after the boom that technologies like the railroad and telegraph really start to matter, so too does Mosco argue that "it is when technologies… cease to be sublime icons of mythology and enter the prosaic world of banality… that they become important forces for social and economic change." (6)

It's had some positive reviews in Technology and Society, First Monday (scroll down to the second review), SCRIPT-ed, Culture Machine, and University Affairs, among other places. Yet I find myself less impressed by the book. What's there to object to? I think there are a couple small things, and one big one.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, ubicomp

The small ones first. First of all, there are the inevitable source issues that scholars spar over. Is it really possible to write an entire book about the evolution of the myth of cyberspace with only a passing mention to John Perry Barlow's work, and no mention at all of Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities (or its sequel, Smart Mobs)? The large and in my view high-quality literature that grapples with legal issues raised by the concept of cyberspace isn't very well-known, so its absence (except for Lessig's Code) is kind of understandable; but leaving out Barlow and Rheingold- not to mention a host of lesser-known West Coast cyber-libertarians/prophets/entrepreneurs- strikes me as more questionable.

Second, if you buy the idea that "it is when technologies… enter the prosaic world of banality… that they become important forces for social and economic change," that suggests that it would be worthwhile to spend some energy asking how cyberspace's role will change once it becomes plain old infrastructure. But the book pretty abruptly drops that ball:

[J]ust as electricity withdrew into the woodwork to become an even more powerful force by virtue of its ability to empower a range of activities, computers may well withdraw into what in 1988 Mark Weiser of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center called "ubiquitous computing."…. These researchers saw the computer as growing in power while withdrawing as a presence.

This view, what some have called "embodied physicality," is the unrecognized sibling of the more popular notion of virtual reality. The development of electricity certainly does not precisely match that of the computer, but there is sufficient similarity to compel the conclusion that embodied physicality may prove to be a more potent force for social change than the development of virtual worlds…. In any event, we are not likely to know whether embodied physicality is the direction cyberspace will take for 50 years or so. (21-22)

Really? Fifty years? You could probably find some skeptics of ubicomp who would say it won't happen until 2055, but many more knowledgeable people see it coming sooner: Adam Greenfield argues that everyware is already in limited release in select cities. Of course, I would make the argument that the myth of cyberspace won't survive the migration of computing technologies from desktops into woodwork. But that disappearance is itself an interesting thing that has to be explained in terms of changes in user experience, practice, and culture.

This leads to my final, big criticism of The Digital Sublime, and one that is in a way most personal. The book is very text- and elites-oriented: it sees cyberspace as something made by the likes of Negroponte, Francis Cairncross, Kenichi Ohmae, James Martin, Francis Kukuyama, Ray Kurzweil, and William Mitchell. The creators of the myth of cyberspace constitute a Who's Who of transatlantic jet-setting public intellectuals, equally at home on the pages of the Financial Times, the seminar rooms of the Sloan School, and the slopes of Davos.

I think this is wrong- or at the very least, incomplete. I agree with Alisdair MacIntyre's claim that myths aren't true nor false, but living or dead; and the people who bring them to life are the users of cyberspace, not its critics and commentators. If the myth of cyberspace lives, it's because hundreds of millions of people have used it to make sense of the experience of going online. They used it to give some mental structure to what happens when they communicate with others online. They used it to help guide them through Web sites. And they appealed to it to give some excitement and nobility to the experience of waiting to connect to ISPs or hunting around for open wifi points. e-topia and The Death of Distance (and all the other books Mosco reviews) are merely resources in the construction of cyberspace.

Of course, this criticism can be read as a map of a deep theoretical divide. Who's more responsible for the success of giant enterprises, the CEOs who do the vision thing, or the thousands of people who actually do stuff? Is a religion a set of holy texts, or people living lives guided by those texts? Is Silicon Valley a giant game of Sims played by venture capitalists, or is it the collective product of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people working in cublcles and labs and factories and garages? In each case, I'd come down firmly with the second option; judging by the attention it gives to talking heads, The Digital Sublime would come down on the first.